Benefits and Challenges or OER

1. Why OER?
Pros and Cons
Diana Montealegre, ME.

2. Benefits
 Free.
 Flexibility.
 Collaborative work.
 Promotes your work to a global audience.

3. Free
 One of the most relevant benefits or using OER is that
they are free to use by the public.
 With the unbalanced economy we have around the
world, only a small percentage of people have a
access to quality education while the others stay
behind because of the lack of financial resources to
access a higher education.
 OER offers these population a chance to access this
education for free, giving them the chance to have a
better and brighter future.

4. Flexible
 OER are available for anyone at anytime. This flexibility
makes ideal for working people who cannot be tied
up to a study schedule, to be able to study at their
own pace, not worrying about time frame or grading.

5. Collaborative work.
 Because of the nature of OER being “free” and most
of them hosted on the internet, it is easy for people all
over the world to work in a document to make it
complete, successful and a quality work, to ensure we
are giving the potential students a great content that
it is update with the industry of study.

6. Promotes your work to a
global audience
 By publishing your work as OER you are showing
yourself and your knowledge to the world not only to
your students in the classrooms.
 People around the world have access to your work
and give you a image and status.
 You can share your knowledge with those one who
have no easy access to a higher education because
of financial issues.
 Both, you and the students, are benefiting in this
process.

7. Challenges
 Is the author really a subject matte expert?
 Is the document updated?
 Is it really OER?
 Language barrier
 Are they really attributing the work to the rightful
author?

8. Is the author really a subject
matte expert?
 One of the challenge we have with the use of OER is
to determine if the person who created the material
knows about the subject matter in study.
 Many people can claim to know about something,
but their facts are far from correct.
 It is important to review the material in detail before
using it for our own classes.
 But what about the people who don’t know anything
about the topic and are trying to learn it from theses
materials?...There is the big challenge!

9. Is the document updated?
 Another challenge we find with the use of OER, is that
many of these contents are obsolete and nobody has
reviewed them for years.
 People who has no knowledge of a subject matter is
accessing to materials that are not updated, leaving
them with information that may not be accurate at
the moment.

10. Is it really OER?
 In my opinion the biggest challenge is to know if that
material is actually OER.
 Many people collects pieces of work from different
places to put together an “original” work and then
post it as OER when all of the sources are well know to
be copyrighted.
 We have to be careful in what we use and make sure
it is actually OER, it is time consuming but it is the right
to do.

11. Language Barrier
 All OER material are written in different languages,
unfortunately that means that not everybody can
have a benefit from it because of their language not
being the same as the document.
 This brings the need of translate all OER material
available to different language, this means money
plus time.

12. Are they really attributing the
work to the rightful author?
 Many unscrupulous people navigate the web daily
pretending to be someone else and stealing
proprietary material and claiming them as their own.
 It is important to research about the material and
make sure that the person who is claiming to be the
author, it is actually the rightful author of it.